I’m feeling a strong sense of mourning for the end of Bard-A-Thon which was more fun this last week than I could have imagined. The experience of sitting around an ill-lit table in the back of a side street store front down town at all hours of the day or night reading great prose and poetry out loud with one other person or with a dozen was so deeply satisfying that I’m looking around my life for ways to re-create it. Having steeped myself in Shakespeare and read nine plays in six days I have derived a few useful universal principles we can take from the cannon. Feel free to chip in with your own!
In any odd case of mistaken identity, check for a missing twin before you assume everyone around you is bewitched.
Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night
This follows on the idea of “when you hear hoof beats think horses not zebras.” I would say its particularly apt when, as Antipholus in Comedy of Errors, you have been traveling around for the last six years looking for your long lost twin brother and suddenly you find yourself in a place where people you don’t know seem to recognize you as a neighbor. Logic might suggest that you had succeeded in your quest and should start looking around the area for a guy that looks just like you. I find this a little more excusable in Viola and Sebastian but … really its still pretty dippy.
If your boss betrays and kills everyone around him, watch your back at the end of the story.
Richard III
I have to say Buckingham seems like one of the stupidest characters in all of Shakespeare. Bear in mind that I’m including Sir Andrew Aguecheek (of Twelfth Night) in this assessment. He is working for a guy who begins the play by saying:
“I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous
By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams.”
OK so granted he says these things in monologue to the audience but Buckingham stands around and listens while Richard outlines nearly countless other betrayals, either by ordering people dead, stirring up trouble so that other people send the orders, killing them himself on the battle field or by asking them confusing questions and then declaring them to be traitors – then having them executed. He helps Richard kill his own nephews for crying out loud. Then at the end, he’s shocked that he isn’t richly rewarded for his service (while Richard is in the middle of a fairly serious uprising at that). Not one of the world’s brightest lights, our Buckingham. Unsurprisingly he ends up dead. Nearly everyone does. So many people die in Richard III (both on stage and off that they have to import a new cast of characters from France to finish the play.
If your boyfriend is mad at you, tell him you’re dead.
Much Ado About Nothing, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra
This one works great – instead of having your issues out with your significant other through discussion just have someone go tell them that you died after your last fight. It helps if the messenger seems really upset and also if they say that your last words were the name of your love. Watch out though – because depending on the context of comedy or tragedy this plan can backfire badly. Priests seem often to offer this advice (MAAN, R&J) but that is not always a guarantee of its success. What you want to do is make sure that your loved one will be shaken but not totally undone by grief. If you fear the latter make sure that whomever you send with the follow up message of “just kidding” comes in good time or you may find that they’ve prematurely killed themselves. Then you have to actually kill yourself. It is the only way.
So this rule has a follow up: Read the rest of this entry »
(somewhat smugly) at the louring clouds – thinking I’d gotten out from under it. That picture, I should note, was taken at 2:00 pm! (The place I stopped happened to be the charmingly named Cut Across Road.) However as the weather map screen shot from shortly after my arrival shows – I did not escape the storm. In fact I established a new definition for the word torrential while I crawled along at 40, barely able to see the car 100 yards in front of me. I am so grateful to be parked and now my knuckles are returning to their accustomed flesh tone.
